


in the middle before i knew

by jontinf



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Deviates From Canon, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, One Shot, Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 07:17:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2539106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jontinf/pseuds/jontinf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Still friends with the ex, eh?” her grandmother asks, refilling her wine glass. “Does it ever get awkward?”</p><p>Clara takes a deep breath.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in the middle before i knew

**Author's Note:**

> Missing scenes from series eight and AU after "In the Forest of the Night."

_I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation._

_It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun._

― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

*

They tend to leave their things scattered around in each other's lives.

Clara once leaves a hair clip on a desk in his library. He doesn’t know what to do with it, hesitating to even touch it as though it might be a biohazard.

Her books he does touch. She finds them days later, the Doctor having scribbled in them with anecdotes and corrections, claims that he’s the inspiration for the Artful Dodger, among other literary characters.

Some of the Doctor’s things could actually be biohazards. He leaves behind a blow dryer that makes her hair go green. She aims it at him like a weapon when he laughs at her and turns his hair orange, eyebrows included.

He stands down an entire army of Sontarans looking like that.

She teaches an entire week with green hair. Danny offers her a sympathetic shrug, because he already knows. Her students wonder if she’s trying to make a point about  _Middlemarch_.

Her hair stays green when she visits her father’s house for lunch. Her family watch her in stunned silence, considering whether they should stage some sort of intervention.

Clara sits obliviously at the end of the table, poking at mashed peas that match her hair.

“How’s life, love?” her dad asks as casually as he can.

“What?”

Her grandmother points in her direction while tugging at strands of her own hair.

Clara whips up a lie. “The water in my flat! It’s  _bad_. I have exchanged some very heated words with my landlord. Such a nightmare.”

“You might stay a night or two then?” Linda suggests later. “While the landlord situation sorts itself out.”

“Oh, that’s fine. The Doctor is picking me up.”

Stunned silence again. Their memories of the Doctor are nakedness, offers to play Twister, and Clara disappearing with him and then phoning late on Christmas day asking to be picked up from Scotland.

“Still friends with the ex, eh?” her grandmother asks, refilling her wine glass. “Does it ever get awkward?”

Clara takes a deep breath.

 

 

 

 

She means every single word when she tells him to go a long way and never come back. But the loss of him grows ever more wrenching.

Three days, seventeen hours, eight minutes, and four seconds later, the TARDIS materializes in her flat, parked between the cheapest Argos shoe rack she could buy and her mother’s old hoover.

He steps out holding a pair of emerald green silk heels, one shoe in each hand, like some fishmonger at a Sunday market.

Clara sits cross-legged on her sofa, having recently consumed half a bottle of Pinot Noir, beset by laundry, and clutching a pair of her own pants.

Inebriated and swathed in one's own delicates. Just how one wants to appear in front of someone they're cross with.

“Doctor, I—”

“I found these for you." He places the shoes on her lap without meeting her eyeline. “Just in case you need to reach a shelf ever again. You just never know. They belonged to Jean Harlow, really lovely, gone far too young, maybe an inch taller than you, in fact. Which probably means you’re the same size.”

Clara pushes her pants into the side of a seat cushion and holds the heels in her lap, resisting the instinct to correct him about how shoe sizes work. She spies him looking expectantly at his peace offering, which makes her feel genuinely heartbroken at the prospect of the shoes not fitting.

“Thank you," she says. “Thank you,” she says more faintly, as if warming up her mind, trying to will the right words to be sounded.

“I got carried away,” he says, now looking at her. “I shouldn’t have gotten carried away.”

“I shouldn’t have said—” she moves fingers through her hair, which feel too grimy for her liking, “—some of what I said.”

He smiles a little, accepting this, and growing hopeful. She’s not sure when she’s last seen him like this. Vulnerable. Not since Glasgow.

“Do you still want to stop?” He's trying his best to sound obliging.

The Doctor’s face falls when he sees her hesitation, not having expected her to stay upset. She still is. Deeply, irrevocably _infuriated_.

“I think I do." A sad smile makes its first appearance. “Yeah.”

“Okay.” His voice is even gruffer than it usually is, eyes widening, having to accept this too, like a child absorbing the fact that Santa couldn’t bother squeezing through his family’s chimney.

He wanders the flat and starts to divest himself from her life, picking up his sonic blow dryer, tucking the spoon he threatened Robin Hood with into a jacket pocket, draping a long burgundy scarf over his shoulders, taking a Pink Floyd CD out of a cereal box.

“Oh, bloody hell,” Clara mutters to herself, burying her face in her hands. She decides it’s time to announce another decision she’s made. “Doctor, stop.”

He does, of course, all his attention now devoted to her, despite his sleeve rolled up to his elbow, tongue poking out the corner of his mouth, and an arm reaching down into her fish tank, reclaiming heaven knows what.

“How do you feel about one last hurrah?”

 

 

 

 

The force of the TARDIS heaves their bodies away from the console. The pair of them stumble to maintain balance, eyes fixed on each other, laughing, out of breath, and still dressed for the Orient Express. She’s wearing those Jean Harlow shoes. They fit perfectly.

Clara shakes her head with an embarrassed smile, creeps her hands around his waist, and hugs him furiously.

“Shut up,” she says when his breath hitches.

He fusses, does his best to act put upon, but pats his palms carefully against the bare skin of her shoulders.

She smiles blithely into his chest, heart racing, feeling like she’s doing something she shouldn’t.

“You look beautiful,” he says out of nowhere.

She laughs, the only living sound for miles and miles around them, and holds him even tighter. It’s hard to know if he means it, if he just wants to break the silence because he thinks he should say something nice.

“I should threaten to dump you more often.”

 

 

 

 

A few weeks later, Clara threatens to quit again; and again during the 1928 Thames flood; and another five thousand years after that at the edge of a galactic motorway near the principality of Amans-in-Iracundia.

She threatens to leave on a regular basis. Shouting matches, scenes in public, pointed fingers, and Girl Friday zingers thrown all about space and time. The Doctor threatens to quit once too, mid-fight and flight, arms in the air, threatening to retire from everything and anything but  _especially her_.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she says as she pulls him back by the collar and away from the TARDIS’s threshold.

They sort it out, of course, a tradition as time-honoured as their quarrelling. He needs her opinion on something, and she cannot not give it to him. This particular time was negotiating a pardon which would restore a certain exiled sea monster to her home planet.

(Nessie returns every so often to help with the economy of the Highlands).

“Home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition,” the Doctor tells Clara. They watch from behind a bush as their friend scares the living daylights out of an unsuspecting but later elated family of Americans.

Clara twitches at the underlying sentiment before declaring, “James Baldwin.”

She turns to look up at him, grinning with pride, and he looks back at her with one of his typical expressions of rapt annoyance.

She elbows him. “Trying to impress me?”

The Doctor shrugs. "If you’re going to travel with an English teacher, you’re going to have to read a couple of books. Otherwise, what are you going to talk about?”

Clara nods playfully, and they watch the last few ripples fade into the loch, tinged orange from a sky at the day’s end. She curls her fingers around his arm. “Know what? I think old Ness is long overdue for a companion.”

He sighs but is amused all the same. “You’re probably right.”

 

 

 

 

“That’s the problem with  _boy-_ friends,” the Doctor spits. “They’re all contagious.”

A group of students passing by overhear and giggle, prompting Clara to grit her teeth, call out after them that  _he doesn’t mean it that way,_ and then pull the Doctor into an alcove in order to vent.

Danny has the flu. Danny has the flu, and no, she can’t go to Deep Space 9 right now—"Demons Star 99," the Doctor corrects—because they are now two chaperones down for the school dance, it’s the very last minute, and everything is just a total, total mess.

The Doctor only volunteers himself for this role when Clara doubts his ability to accomplish it. She tells him that if she loses her job because a student sprouts fangs or gills, he actually has to start paying her full-time.

They stand side by side at the start of the night and look at the room full of students with a deep dread that is only felt when you’re about to do something you really don’t want to do.

“I just remembered that I hate school dances,” he whispers grimly.

“I would always end up reading off at the side.”

Around this age, Clara wore shaggy haircuts and second-hand clothes that were too big for her, was motherless, and always wanted to be anywhere but where she was.

“Really?” he says. “I thought the boys would be lining up at the opportunity to get a closer look at your stupendously round face.”

“Did you hate dances so much because your head was too big to fit in the room? Is that why the TARDIS is bigger on the inside?”

They decide they have to supervise  _for real_  and march to opposite sides of the gym to smoulder for a good five minutes.

Until the Doctor practically leaps back to her side.

“This is incredibly boring. I’ve never stood this still in my life. I might regenerate from total disuse.”

“What  _honestly_  did you expect?”

“ _I don’t know_. I thought I could maybe interrupt a few first kisses. Make a boutonniere fly off of someone’s jacket. Nobody’s kissing, Clara! I think we should instate a rule that rations laughing to two people at any given time.”

“First of all, laughing is always a good thing. Secondly, there will be no airborne boutonnieres at this dance. Thirdly, it is not  _kissing_  we should be worried about as much as people spitting in the drinks.”

The Doctor directs his attention elsewhere while she is speaking. He braces his elbow on Clara’s shoulder and points at a student.

“Does that boy look real to you?”

“You mean Gilbert?”

“He’s almost  _too_  good-looking. Who is even that good-looking at this age? What do you think he’s hiding?”

“He’s not hiding anyth—”

In that moment, in an act of sheer cosmic coincidence, young Gilbert lunges at a ginger adversary who is a year beneath him. The Doctor gleefully pulls out his sonic screwdriver.

“Doctor, he is _not_  an alien.” She slaps at his sonic and pulls him along with her so they can each grasp onto an opponent and tear them away from each other.

He does a double-take at the sight of Clara nearly lifting a ginger boy twice her size in both width and height. Somebody throws a chair for the hell of it.

It turns out the commotion is not of extra-terrestrial origin but because someone was laughed at over something teenagery or other, much to the Doctor’s disappointment. He can’t help brag, however. “What did I say about laughing!”

Clara later singlehandedly manages to keep things on track, while the Doctor plays DJ whenever the music doesn’t appeal to him, sonics Gilbert just to be  _extra_  sure that he was 100% human, and lets one Courtney Woods dash him around in an old wheelbarrow from the caretaker’s quarters—that is until Clara tells them off.

The team of disruptive influences sulk off to sit at a corner of the gym as far away as possible from teacher. Courtney takes a selfie with mostly the side of the Doctor’s nose.

“You’re not going to put more pictures of me on the Internet, are you?”

“Nah, the Internet doesn’t find you that interesting.”

He frowns. “Thank heavens for that.”

He checks on Clara and can’t help snort at her making a face over the cloud of cologne that is attached to a group of boys in her vicinity.

He then peers over at Courtney next to him. “Are you pretending to be texting?”

“No.”

“You are.” He takes the phone from her and shows her the screen accusingly. “Just aimlessly punching buttons.”

“Oh my God." She whips the phone out of his hands. "Shouldn't you be waving at care bears from your spaceship or something?”

He should, it dawns on him. Not care bears, obviously. But like. More menacing. Scare bears. (He makes a note to himself to tell Clara that one.) There must be a reason why he’s here. Something physics related, some force of attraction that’s drawing him to this very place at this very moment.

Maybe the school was built on a volcano.

Courtney meanwhile has moved on to a game of Angry Birds.

“Shouldn’t you be dancing?” the Doctor asks. “Isn’t that what people do at dances?”

“There isn’t anyone to dance with. My parents made me go anyway.”

Her grades have shot up since the moon, much to his self-satisfaction. Though he dare not brag about  _that_  in front of Clara. Boys, on the other hand, boys were still an enigma swaddled in trousers that never quite fit.

“What about Iqbal? I’m almost certainly sure he’s human. Still have my suspicions about a couple of his friends though.”

“Why would I want to dance with  _him_?”

"Because you're always looking at the boy like he’s the overture to the grandest symphony you've ever heard—" is what he wants to say. Not that he’s been keeping track of her. “You’re not scared, are you?”

“ _No_.”

“I’m just saying it’d be incredibly ironic, considering how you killed, like, a mammoth moon spider a few months ago.”

“I’m not scared, okay?” Courtney gives him a long glare, which changes into a dangerous grin. “Are  _you_  scared?”

“I’ve  _danced_.”

“With a person?”

He stares back at her, affronted, eyebrows assembling into attack mode.

“Ha!” she says. “I’ll dance with Iqbal if you dance with Miss Oswald.”

The Doctor goes pale. _“Why her?”_

“Cause you’d probably go to jail with anyone else.”

The Doctor curtly nods in bleak agreement. “Taking one for the team, am I?”

He watches Courtney approach Iqbal hesitantly. It seems like an eternity. He has to shoo away some kids blocking his view. He’s stricken when he thinks the boy has turned her down, but then she turns around and beams back at him. He gives them a thumbs up as they head off to the dance floor, then wonders to himself why he's bothering caring when his carer is over there watching Courtney and Iqbal like they’re a new development on EastEnders.

The Doctor clears his throat and approaches Clara with his hands stiffly at his side, as awkward as any of the pubescents around him.

“Well done, you,” she tells him. “They’ve been dancing around each other for ages. No pun intended.”

“Do you teachers just gossip about your students all the time?”

“Yeah,” she says, a matter of fact.

The Doctor hesitates and looks to Courtney, who is now miming at him to go through with his end of their deal.

He turns to face Clara pleadingly.

“What is it?” she says. She fusses at her face. “Do I have crisp crumbs on me again?”

“Dance with me.”

“Come again?”

He extends his hand and points his sonic up at the ceiling. A disco ball appears and a disembodied baritone from the eighties begins to croon:  _now Iiiiiii’ve haaaaad the time of my liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiife_.

“You are  _so_  weird,” she says but takes his hand anyway.

She can’t even try not to smile, especially when he has one of those dopey faces he makes when he thinks he’s being incredibly clever, which is always begrudgingly entertaining.

Someone shouts  _yeah, Miss Oswald!_  and she realizes that she and the Doctor are in fact dancing. Dancing to  _Dirty Dancing._  Hands clasped, close proximity, faces front, feet moving. The very definition of the word. And they’re enjoying it.

Students clamour to watch the caretaker dance with the teacher bestowed the second-most chilli peppers for Coal Hill on  _Rate My Teacher.com_. (First place was at home with the flu.) It is an unexpected turn of events, like witnessing a flash mob form—something  the Doctor’s previous face had joyously partaken in and his current one mourns like a dark chapter from his past.

“You look nice,” she says out of nowhere, because he really does to her. Even when covered in wheelbarrow mud.

“I should chaperone more often,” the Doctor says.

“No." She laughs. “You really shouldn’t.”

He smiles at that as he lifts her arm over her head and twirls her to her right. Courtney grins nearby, inspired to develop a new line of school graffiti, starting with Clara’s classroom.

 

 

 

 

She’ll never live even a fraction as long as the Doctor has.

The thought comes to Clara in a queue on a Tuesday evening while waiting to pay for milk and bread. The person waiting behind her has to tap her on the shoulder to shake her out of it.

Travelling with a 2000-year-old does put certain things into perspective, that and a preachy magazine article on women, quinoa, and biological clocks she read in her GP’s waiting room, the realization striking her that with all her time travelling, her physical body has grown months, perhaps, even years older than she is on paper.

She doesn’t even know what age she is anymore.

Clara always knew that their time together would eventually end. Danny might ask her to marry him. (She can’t picture herself asking—not yet, but she would say yes if he asked at the risk of losing him.) She might decide to have children or take on greater responsibilities at work. She might just get  _older,_  back pains, sore feet, and less stamina. The Doctor might lose interest and realize that he doesn’t want to travel with somebody’s mother who has high blood pressure, as one might likely develop when you escape death four times a month.

She would never abide by that, the Doctor being the one to end it. Not for any of those reasons. She’d have to beat him to it.

 

 

 

 

Clara glares at Danny’s bedside alarm that night, which warns her that at 2:23 am, it will be four hours until they’ll have to wake up for work. Sensing her unease, Danny slides an arm around her middle and pulls her in tighter.

“Hon, you’re going to be so tired,” he says, ever wise even when half-asleep.

“You have no idea,” she whispers, wanting to make some maths joke where she asks him to help her calculate her real exact age, as if it’s a matter of sorting accounts and income tax.

She wonders if she could spend two thousand years doing what the Doctor does. The nonstop running, adrenalin, and making her life heavy with boundless wonders.

Would it ever just get  _redundant?_

Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe she  _could_. Freeze her eggs, utilize future technology, make babies when she’s well and ready at the ripe young age of twelve hundred and two.

Clara glances over at her poor boyfriend, wondering if he’d be up for it, having children with an insomniac twelve hundred-year-old space woman, wondering if anyone ever could be.

 

 

 

 

The Doctor bolts up the stairs to meet Clara and sink into the over-sized armchair alongside his bookshelf-lined walls. It’s one of Clara’s favourite parts of a desktop she still hasn't warmed up to, the odd bits and pieces that make the TARDIS look anthropological, like somewhere Indiana Jones might live.

“Where you off to now?” She stuffs a few future Booker Prizes from his library into her purse.

“I might just stay here.” The Doctor turns his own book sideways, peering at it as if it contains lewd and ineligible writing found in a public toilet.

“You’re welcome to join Danny and me if you’d like.”

The Doctor cavalierly turns the book to the correct angle and then tears the last page out with a clinical readiness.

Clara gasps in horror. He smirks.

“Still with him, are you?”

She takes the dismembered page and sees that he’s just defaced a leather-bound manual for a 1970s Osborne refrigerator. Clara swipes the entire manual and hits him with it.

“I wish you’d be more supportive,” she says. “That’s what friends do.”

“I don’t understand. He’s not my friend.”

“But you’re  _mine_. Inexplicably despite yourself.”

They stare at each other for a moment. She considers hitting him again to drive the point home. He puts his hands up and plays at moving hers away.

“If it makes you happy,” the Doctor says, still smiling.

“Thank you." She leans down and kisses the corner of his mouth. A quick peck on the cheek was the idea, having totally forgotten that this is not something they do anymore.

He grips the armrests a little tighter, his body tensing as if he’s been punched in the gut from within. The Doctor is blushing, she realizes. They both are.

She puts the manual on a nearby table, chastened, and backs away slowly.

“Sorry.” She winces at the floor and then hurries down the stairs attempting to outrace her own mortification.

“Yeah,” she hears him say behind her.

Danny greets Clara with a kiss as she steps out into a perfectly blue morning in Regent’s Park. The second she thinks she's in the clear, she hears someone shouting something.

“Lookin’ very dreamy today, PE!”

She turns around to find the Doctor, poking his head out of the TARDIS. He then proceeds to salute Danny, step back in, and slam the door.

It is Danny’s turn to be bewildered. “Was he taking the piss?”

Clara rolls her eyes. He absolutely was. “I think he was being nice.”

“Why is he wearing a Mickey Mouse shirt? Did you go to Disneyland or something?”

“On Jupiter. The ‘It’s A Small World’ ride gets even  _weirder_ centuries later. And the topiary? Haunted.”

“Haunted?”

“With clowns.”

“Stop right there.” Danny drapes an arm around her shoulders as they walk off together. “That is the absolute worst thing ever.”

Clara chews on her bottom lip, still a touch dazed from before.

“The worst,” she echoes.

Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor stands hunched over the console, a finger absent-mindedly tracing the edges of all the round things in front of him. He’s always been fond of round things.

The TARDIS groans and rattles, coaxing him to get over himself... and change his shirt, if possible, because it was getting embarrassing to be seen with him. Even with her patience.

“Don’t  _you_  start,” he scolds.

 

 

 

 

He kneels before her as she sits in a pew of the Temple Sainte-Marie in eighteenth century Paris, scrapes scattered about her face and knees. He’s a bit beaten up himself, nearly as bad as her. There is dust everywhere and a lot of garbled shouting. The TARDIS’s translation circuit must be malfunctioning. Banshee-watching during the French Revolution might have been the least well-thought out idea either of them ever had.

Somebody tried to hurt Clara, not any dalek or cyberman, but an ordinary person, a soldier, who would be long dead before she’s even born. There is blood that needs to be stopped on both of their clothes, and it does  _hurt_ , but she resolves to withstand it.

His hands shake a bit, furious with himself for letting her get hurt in the first place. He finishes wrapping the bandage around her wrist, aware that she’s putting on a brave face about the pain and the fear and her own hurt pride.

He's angry with her too, unwilling to even speak with her because of her recklessness and arrogance. He steals a tentative glance at her, then gently flips over her hand and begins tracing the lines on her palm.

She holds her breath without realizing, her lips pursing at the sensation. “What are you doing?”

“Do you know why you have palm lines?”

“No.”

“They help the skin on your hand move."

His thumbs gently put pressure on the base of her palm, slowly tracing each line.

“Each indent, every messy mark, the little etchings on the joints of your fingers.”

A finger slips between her ring finger and pinkie, caressing the edges of both, up and down. He feels her breath quicken and cups her hand and closes it into a fist then lets it fall open again.

“Helping it stretch and squeeze.”

Finally, he puts his hand within hers and lets her hold him, as much as she can.

“All so you can feel, grasp, pull, hit, comfort.”

She puts her other hand over his, still clasped within hers. They share a look, full of tenderness and longing.

He whispers. “The skin and its lines, what would one be without the other?”

 

 

 

 

Half past midnight, Jenny, Vastra, and Clara are meant to be probing the Northumbrian coast for a man with iron fingernails who shoots flames out of his mouth. Business as usual. They find themselves instead soaking their feet in the tides of the North Sea as they talk about the moon.

“Is it  _really_  an egg?” Jenny reclines between her wife’s legs and picks at specks of sand on their trousers.

Elbows propped and very nearly flat on her back, Clara looks up at the sky wistfully. “Yes, it is.”

“I had my suspicions,” Vastra says.

Jenny grins. “You always have your suspicions, dear.”

Playfully, Vastra nudges her chin onto the top of Jenny’s head. “I think, my love, that you are confusing me with Strax.”

“You shouldn’t take it personally, Madame Vastra,” Clara says. “I’ve been mistaken for him too.”

Clara pivots her toes deeper into the water and slowly smiles.

Vastra and Jenny share a knowing look.

“Speaking of which,” Vastra begins to stand up. “I should probably find him and Marcus Aurelius before one or both of them gets killed.”

Clara absently nods at this until it hits her. “Wait a minute—”

She watches Jenny laugh as Vastra pulls her up. On her feet, Jenny straightens the veil over her wife’s face while Vastra anchors her hands to Jenny’s waist.

Clara looks away with an envious smile, briskly brushing the sand off her skirt.

The trio renew their trek toward Bamburgh Castle with Vastra walking ahead of Clara and Jenny.

“How did you know, Jenny?” Clara asks quietly. “That Vastra was the one?”

Jenny looks at Clara with surprise, never quite used to her marriage being acknowledged in any way other than a curiosity, if acknowledged at all. For a moment, Clara thinks she’s misspoken.

“She—” Jenny's gaze is fixed on the woman walking within earshot. “She makes me feel the most of every emotion a person could ever have. Rage, pride, grief, exhilaration, gratitude. I love her with all my soul.”

Vastra’s pace falters, a smile blooming behind the coal-black lace of her veil but then carries on even more resolute.

Clara looks ahead at the moon looming over the twelve hundred-year-old castle in the distance and swallows hard. She rubs a thumb and forefinger over her eyes, feeling a twitch, bleary-eyed at the imminent swell of tears.

“Bloody mountain ranges,” she mutters to herself.

Jenny places a hand at Clara’s elbow. “What is it, ma’am?”

Clara sharply inhales, embarrassed at herself. It’s the moon. She doesn’t feel angry anymore when she looks at it. Not one bit. That furious schoolteacher, so frightened, so betrayed, who could so easily banish the most important thing to her from her life is now a stranger, a fool who couldn’t understand, an unrecognizable figment of her imagination.

She wasn’t supposed to change like this.

 

 

 

 

She sneaks into the TARDIS with her key, heaving into it a large box of every single thing the Doctor has ever left in her flat. Her plan is to leave it all there and bid him goodbye forever, simple as that, like tearing off a band aid. The Jean Harlow shoes peak out at the top, the last two things she put in after an angst-ridden afternoon of pacing, listening to Joni Mitchell, and inhaling a carton of Gilly’s Catastrophic Crunch.

When you want to overcome an addiction, you try to rid yourself of every temptation, any trigger.

She wonders if there’s a support group somewhere for recovering time travellers.

“I suppose I can’t change your mind." He walks into the control room, hands in his pockets. There’s a calm astuteness in his expression that emphasizes his eternalness. It scares her. He’s so addled and silly and bizarre the rest of the time, her Doctor. It’s like he’s malfunctioning.

When he genuinely smiles, a toothy grin, knowing that it’ll set her at ease, she starts breathing again.

“Lure you back in?” he asks. “Promise that you could become bezzie mates with Jane Austen.”

Clara draws a breath. “No.”

“Not even a last hurrah,” he says, knowing her answer.

She smiles. “We had one ages ago.”

“Good plan,” the Doctor nods, back to stoicism. “Get it over with.”

“I know that you don’t like goodbyes.” She begins to turn around. “So, I should just—”

“—you don’t actually have to go.”

He looks like he regrets saying it once it’s been said, not because he doesn’t mean it, but because he isn’t supposed to reveal himself like that. He is supposed to let her leave.

“Yes, I do." She drops the box and bursts out as quickly as she can.

She’s sobbing by the time she’s outside, feeling like an utter idiot. She should be glad that she made it out sane and in one piece and alive and  _happy_.

He’s made her so happy.

“Clara,” the Doctor calls out after her.

He is so  _selfish_ , she thinks, but so is she.

She grabs the lapels of his coat, bringing him down to her level, leans her weight into him, and pushes her forehead against his own.

They breathe each other in, trembling and worn-down.

Clara takes the Doctor’s face in her hands, their eyes tightly shut, as if their lives depend on it. 

“Doctor." Her voice breaks. “Don’t say it. Don’t say it, or I’ll never, ever leave.”

He puts his arms around her, so firmly, for the first and last time, her arms pinned between their bodies. She thinks he could squeeze the air out of her.

“Five foot one and crying,” he breathes out, resigned and smiling sadly, sincerely malfunctioning. “Never stood a chance.”

 

 

 

 

Their last  _last_  hurrah is on her turf, a garden party with family and friends, which include the two children Clara nannied when they first met. He introduces himself as John Smith, and when the children—who are not quite children anymore— catch Clara calling him  _Doctor_ , they give him a second look. To which, he looks them in the eye, taps his nose, and grins.

Clara and the Doctor don’t bother correcting anyone when they are assumed to be together. He is much older than her, of course, but also odd. Her family and friends are resigned to the fact that she has a type.

When the guests leave and her family is fast sleep, they sit on a bench in the back garden. They read her old book,  _101 Places To See_ , and recount all the places she’s seen in it. He listens to her speak of favourite lines that she’s read, favourite myths, and memories from her life, even the ones he’s in. They don’t always agree about those ones, they laugh and bicker, until her voice sweetly fades and she’s fallen asleep on his shoulder.

He shifts his body with care, trying his best not to disturb her, her hair brushing the side of his face. The realization plunges through him that the time has come. She told him to do it this way, let their relationship die in her sleep, because this would be the most painless. For her at least.

He drapes his coat over her body, kisses his fingertips, and puts them to her forehead. He mouths the words she wouldn’t let him say into the crook of her neck. Then he's gone, only Jean Harlow’s shoes and a packet of jammy dodgers left sitting on a table beside her.

The Doctor steps out into the pavement, heading for the phone box that he’s parallel parked on the street, looking one last time at the Oswald house, and recalling the first time he gazed up at another bedroom window in West London and she smiled back.

The impossible girl. Even now, impossible.

He walks away, the night air chilling his skin, a thin smile on his lips.

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to write a companion’s story running its natural course, where they leave on their own without any big bad event triggering it. In this case, Clara senses that she’s losing her humanity and that their love for each other would only make it harder to leave the longer she stayed. (Never try to control a control freak!) Nonetheless, I have it in my head that they do reunite in the future.
> 
> Since they dropped the Pride and Prejudice/Darcy and Elizabeth references in The Caretaker, it’s been haunting me—in a ‘holy shit this is so brilliant I want these parallels in a Doctor/companion relationship so much’ kind of way. Hence, the title and epigraph. Also, that quote just rings true for them, doesn’t it?
> 
> Massive thanks to rubberglue and withkissesfour/what--larks for listening to me talk about Twelve x Clara incessantly since August and for the former’s encouragement and sharing her thoughts with me about this story.


End file.
